The Abortion Edition Of "Mean Tweets"

The Abortion Edition Of "Mean Tweets" Is Hilarious, Horrifying

You may have seen Jimmy Kimmel's deliciously cringe-inducing "Mean Tweets" videos, wherein celebrities read the terrible things people tweet about them to a live studio audience. Now, reproductive rights organization A Is For has created its own version, starring Amelia Bonow, Martha Plimpton, Ijeoma Oluo, Margaret Cho, Kirsten West Savali, and Lindy West, a few of the women who banded together under the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion (created by Bonow and West) to share their experiences of terminating a pregnancy. The hashtag went viral — it was included in over 150,000 Twitter posts — and inspired both gratitude and venom.

The video above offers a glimpse into the minds of the army of critics that rose up to meet the #ShoutYourAbortion tweeters. "Stop killing your own people and start helping them become better people instead," one tweeter advises Ijeoma Oluo, deftly injecting racism into the argument against reproductive rights. "If you understood physiology, you'd know that the interior of the uterus is external to woman's body," a commentator who apparently skipped elementary school informs West.

The tweeters' ignorance is funny, but their vitriol is deeply disturbing. Tweets that liken Benedict Cumberbatch's face to a cat's anus sort of pale in comparison to those calling women who have had abortions "cunts," "pigs," and "murderers." While hate speech is unacceptable no matter how small the group at which it's directed, the Guttmacher Institute reports that nearly three in 10 American women will have an abortion by age 45. That's a pretty damn large group of people to refer to as cunts, pigs, and murderers — and the women behind #ShoutYourAbortion are not letting that language go unchecked.